• IBM, VMware Working on ESX Server Support for the System i

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A new Redbook Residency program that IBM has announced was noticed by a bunch of you last week, who sent me links to the page to ask me what I thought about it. The Redbook Residency program is a great idea, particularly if you are IBM and you don’t want to have to write a Redbook technical paper or longer document describing the ins and out of a new technology. So what IBM does is invite techies from around the globe to come to the Rochester Labs (in the case of System i technology) for a few weeks, where they

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• Q4bis Raises $6 Million in Venture Capital Funding

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Business intelligence software maker Q4bis, which recently moved its headquarters from New Zealand to Irvine, California, to take on the North American market, announced last week that it has received $6 million in Series A venture capital funding from a group of investors led by TVC Capital. Q4bis has over 200 customers worldwide using its Q4bis BI Suite today, including a number of companies that have back-end systems based on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. However, the company’s software runs on Microsoft‘s Windows operating system and uses its SQL Server 2005 database as its data store. Many

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• Workload Partitions Not Coming to i5/OS V6R1?

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, in the wake of a server reorganization that saw the System i business split into two bits, IBM announced an upcoming Power6-based, enterprise-class System i 570 server and also previewed some of the features in the upcoming i5/OS V6R1 operating system, due in 2008. IBM walked the midrange press through a rough sketch of the July 24 announcements to get the word out to the i5/OS and OS/400 base. But two features–workload partitions and its related application mobility–were not on the list. IBM first started talking about workload partitions and application mobility back in early 2006, when VMware

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• Jack Henry Acquires Gladiator Technology

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of bright spots in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem, and Jack Henry & Associates, the provider of financial services software and hardware, is one of them. The company is growing, profitable, publicly traded, and making acquisitions. Specifically, Jack Henry has acquired Gladiator Technology Services, a provider of security services specifically tailored to banks and other financial institutions. Jack Henry is located in Monett, Missouri, and was founded in 1976, when most companies did not yet have computers but financial institutions were buying up mainframes like crazy to automate operations that were people-intensive up until that

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• Power6-Based System i Performance and Bang for the Buck

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Say what you will about IBM, but in the two decades I have been following its systems and server divisions, Big Blue has done a remarkably good job providing its customers very detailed performance data to describe the amount of work that its machines can do. No other server maker provides relative performance metrics like customers buying System i, System p, and System z servers can get. As part of the rollout of the Power6-based System i 570, which was launched last week, IBM gave out preliminary benchmark test results. As you might imagine, the relative increase in the

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• HP Sells Heat Modeling Service to Cool Data Centers

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The real problem with data centers is that they are on CRAC. No, that is not a twist on the Gaelic word for romping good fun, craic, but rather the short-hand for computer room air conditioning unit. This is the device that cools the air, removes water from it, and pumps cold air into parts of a modern data center, thereby keeping servers, storage, and networking equipment from melting. CRAC units also take away heat, which gets sucked into HVAC systems and vented to the outside world. If Hewlett-Packard is right, companies are not necessarily using CRAC correctly, and

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• The IT Job Market Is More Competitive, Says Gartner

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a new report from IT industry watcher Gartner, chief information officers are having a hard time filling vacant positions in their shops for IT professionals. Specifically, because some IT skills are in high demand, positions are being left open for longer than they would like them to be as candidates pick and choose among job offers. If Gartner’s assessment is right, then this competitive IT job market is a matter of demand exceeding supply and not a drop in supply. But anecdotal evidence from some colleges as well as statistics from the U.S. government would seem to

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• Study Counts the Cost of Data Breaches

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Compliance regulations are a big pain in the neck, but putting policies and practices in place that control who has access to what information and under what conditions is not just a requirement of many laws, it is also a good idea in an increasingly networked and computerized world. But often, companies look at compliance measures as a cost, much as they did when they considered mainframes and minicomputers decades ago. But the IT Policy Compliance Group wants companies to think of compliance efforts as a means of preserving corporate reputations and revenues. In a new report entitled Why Compliance

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• User Feedback Credited for Inspiring System i Development

  July 30, 2007 Dan Burger

  Last week was a big news week for IBM‘s System i product line. Announcements about the pending release of the latest version of its operating system, V6R1, the availability of Power6 processors in its servers, and the creation of enterprise-level and SMB-level divisions for marketing its systems created some fireworks that caught the attention of many System i community members. We knew the system upgrades were coming. We just didn’t know when. The high-end and entry-level split of the System i line came as a surprise. Change is good. It is also inevitable. Like it or not, you can

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• Lawson Back in the Black as Fiscal 2007 Closes

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ERP software maker Lawson Software celebrated the one-year anniversary of its acquisition of sometime rival Intentia International by getting back into the black during its fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, which ended on May 31. For the quarter, Lawson booked sales of $212.9 million, up 69 percent mostly because of the addition of Intentia. More importantly, as far as Lawson shareholders are concerned, Lawson had a net income of $8.1 million in the quarter, a lot better than the $4.8 million loss it had a year ago. During the quarter, software license fees rose by 111 percent to $40.6 million,

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